Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire

Two Years

“Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.” – Victor Hugo

Over 20 years ago I lost my daughter to the adoption machine via a baby broker named Kurtz.

Two years ago today, I found her.

I wrote her.

She wrote me back.

She shared pictures with me and bits of her life.

She personally fulfilled the broken promises made to me by the agency and her adopters. She gave me the proof that she was alive. She sent me the pictures that had been promised for twenty years but never came.

It’s been a challenging two years. I don’t regret it one bit but I would be lying if I said it was easy. It’s very tough wanting to mother someone that doesn’t consider you her mother. It’s hard to be a friend when you are a mother. Its hard to respect boundaries that were set by others. Unnatural boundaries that were set by the laws of man not mother nature. The ties that bind are indeed ties and they do bind.

I entered reunion with very little expectation. It was all about her and finding her and telling her she was always wanted, always loved, always missed. It was about healing as much of her primal wound as I could. It was about telling her she was welcome in our lives and her sibling’s lives and has never ever been a secret.

As reunion progressed it became more about me. Each time I looked into her beautiful face/photo, I was in pain. I would hunger to rock my child. To hold her. To run my fingers through her hair. To sit with her during a thunderstorm and assure her that mommy was here and that those flashers and boomers couldn’t hurt her. Each time I saw her amended name, the mother in me cried out in defiance. Each time she referred to her adopted mother as her mother, the mothers heart in me bled a bit more.

Seeing her face, talking about her, sharing her, was the first time I was acknowledged (by myself and others) as her mother. It has been hard. I swallowed that adoption koolaid by the gallons all those years ago. I told myself I did not matter. I believed what they told me that I could be replaced and any woman could be a mother. Vomitting the koolaid has not been pleasant. With the vomit comes the true, deep realizations of what was done to me, what was done to my daughter and what continues to be done to mothers and children world wide. In the vomit, like alphabet soup, were the words:

Mothers don’t matter.

They were wrong.

My daily life, my subsequent children and more are proof of that. The price that infertiles will pay and the lengths they will go to are further proof. If mothers dont matter, why do so many do such outrageous things to become one?

I don’t know what the future holds for me and my daughter. I try hard not to plan, control or over think it. I try to live in the moment and bask in the wonder of her. Her beauty, her brains, her talents, those fabulous eyes that she got from me and no one else.

Fretting about what tomorrow will bring takes away from what today offers. I waited long for today with her. Even if it’s only glimpses in cyberpace, an email here or there, its more than I had yesterday and I must enjoy it today.

I admit that I do hope someday she is emotionally strong enough to meet me, to tell me her feelings, to be mad at me, to punch me and kick me, whatever she might need to do. I hope she can trust me and believe deep in her soul that I never wanted for us to part. I hope she will feel in every cell of her being that her mother has always loved her and always will.